Dari

Dari, also known as Farsi Dari, Dari Persian, Eastern Persian, or Afghan Persian, is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the Afghan government's official term for the Persian language; it is known as Afghan Persian or Eastern Persian in many Western sources. The decision to rename the local variety of Persian in 1964 was more political than linguistic to support an Afghan state narrative. Dari Persian is most closely related to Tajiki Persian as spoken in Tajikistan and the two share many phonological and lexical similarities. Apart from a few basics of vocabulary, there is little difference between formal written Persian of Afghanistan and Iran; the languages are mutually intelligible. Dari is the official language for approximately 30.6 million people in Afghanistan and it serves as the common language for inter-ethnic communication in the country.
As defined in the 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan, Dari is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan; the other is Pashto. Dari is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and the native language of approximately 25–55% of the population. Dari serves as the lingua franca of the country and is understood by up to 78% of the population.
Dari Persian served as the preferred literary and administrative language among non-native speakers, such as the Turco-Mongol peoples including the Mughals, for centuries before the rise of modern nationalism. Also, like Iranian Persian and Tajiki Persian, Dari Persian is a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenids. In historical usage, Dari refers to the Middle Persian court language of the Sassanids.

Etymology

Dari is a name given to the New Persian language since the 10th century, widely used in Arabic and Persian texts.
Since 1964, it has been the official name in Afghanistan for the Persian spoken there. In Afghanistan, Dari refers to a modern dialect form of Persian that is the standard language used in administration, government, radio, television, and print media. Because of a preponderance of Dari native speakers, who normally refer to the language as Farsi, it is also known as "Afghan Persian" in some Western sources.
There are different opinions about the origin of the word Dari. The majority of scholars believe that Dari refers to the Persian word dar or darbār, meaning 'court', as it was the formal language of the Sassanids. The original meaning of the word dari is given in a notice attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. According to him, Pārsī was the language spoken by priests, scholars, and the like; it is the language of Fars." This language refers to Middle Persian. As for Dari, he says, "it is the language of the cities of Madā'en; it is spoken by those who are at the king's court. is connected with presence at court. Among the languages of the people of Khorasan and the east, the language of the people of Balkh is predominant."
Dari Persian spoken in Afghanistan is not to be confused with the language of Iran called Dari or Gabri, which is a language of the Central Iranian subgroup spoken in some Zoroastrian communities.

History

Dari comes from Middle Persian which was spoken during the rule of the Sassanid dynasty. In general, Iranian languages are known from three periods, usually referred to as Old, Middle, and New periods. These correspond to three eras in Iranian history, the old era being the period from some time before, during, and after the Achaemenid period, the Middle Era being the next period, namely, the Sassanid period and part of the post-Sassanid period, and the New era being the period afterward down to the present day.
The first person in Europe to use the term Deri for Dari may have been Thomas Hyde in his chief work, Historia religionis veterum Persarum.
Dari or Deri has two meanings. It may mean the language of the court:
It may also indicate a form of poetry used from Rudaki to Jami. In the fifteenth century it appeared in Herat under the Persian-speaking Timurid dynasty. The Persian-language poets of the Indian subcontinent who used the Indian verse methods or rhyme methods, like Bedil and Muhammad Iqbal, became familiar with the araki form of poetry. Iqbal loved both styles of literature and poetry, when he wrote:
This can be translated as:
Uzūbat usually means 'bliss', 'delight', 'sweetness'; in language, literature and poetry, uzubat also means 'euphonious' or 'melodic'.
Referring to the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez, Iqbal wrote:
English translation:
Here qand-e Pārsī is a metaphor for the Persian language and poetry.
Persian replaced the Central Asian languages of the Eastern Iranic peoples. Ferghana, Samarkand, and Bukhara were starting to be influenced by Dari, and were originally Khwarezmian and Sogdian-speaking areas during Samanid rule. Dari Persian spread around the Oxus River region, Afghanistan, and Khorasan after the Arab conquests and during Islamic-Arab rule. The replacement of the Pahlavi script with the Arabic script in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirids in 9th century Khorasan. Dari Persian spread and led to the extinction of Eastern Iranian languages like Bactrian and Khwarezmian with only a tiny amount of Sogdian descended Yaghnobi speakers remaining, as the ancestors of Tajiks started speaking Dari after relinquishing their original language around this time, due to the fact that the Arab-Islamic army which invaded Central Asia also included some Persians who governed the region like the Sassanids. Persian was a prestigious high-ranking language and was further rooted into Central Asia by the Samanids. Persian also phased out Sogdian. The role of lingua franca that Sogdian originally played was succeeded by Persian after the arrival of Islam.

Geographical distribution

Dari is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. In practice though, it serves as the de facto lingua franca among the various ethnolinguistic groups.
Dari Persian is spoken by approximately 25–80% of the population of Afghanistan. Tajiks, who comprise 27–39% of the population, are the primary native speakers, followed by Hazaras and Aymāqs. Moreover, while Pashtuns natively speak Pashto, those living in Tajik and Hazara dominated areas also use Dari Persian as their main or secondary language. Thus, non-native Persian speaking groups have contributed to the increased number of Persian speakers within Afghanistan. The World Factbook states that about 80% of the Afghan population speaks Dari Persian. About 2.5 million Afghans in Iran and Afghans in Pakistan, part of the wider Afghan diaspora, also speak Dari Persian as one of their primary languages.
Dari Persian dominates the northern, western, and central areas of Afghanistan, and is the common language spoken in cities such as Balkh, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Fayzabad, Panjshir, Bamiyan, and the Afghan capital of Kabul where all ethnic groups are settled. Dari Persian-speaking communities also exist in southwestern and eastern Pashtun-dominated areas such as in the cities of Ghazni, Farah, Zaranj, Lashkar Gah, Kandahar, and Gardez.

Cultural influence

Dari Persian has contributed to the majority of Persian borrowings in several Indo-Aryan languages, such as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and others, as it was the administrative, official, cultural language of the Persianate Mughal Empire and served as the lingua franca throughout the Indian subcontinent for centuries. Often based in Afghanistan, Turkic Central Asian conquerors brought the language into South Asia. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianised Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. The sizable Persian component of the Anglo-Indian loan words in English and in Urdu therefore reflects the Dari Persian pronunciation. For instance, the words dopiaza and pyjama come from the Afghan Persian pronunciation; in Iranian Persian they are pronounced do-piyāzeh and pey-jāmeh. Persian lexemes and certain morphological elements have often been employed to coin words for political and cultural concepts, items, or ideas that were historically unknown outside the South Asian region, as is the case with the aforementioned "borrowings". Dari Persian has a rich and colorful tradition of proverbs that deeply reflect Afghan culture and relationships, as demonstrated through the works of Rumi and other literature.

Differences between Iranian and Afghan Persian

There are phonological, lexical, and morphological differences between Afghan Persian and Iranian Persian. For example, Afghan Farsi has more vowels than Iranian Farsi.

Phonological differences

The phonology of Dari Persian as spoken in Kabul, compared with Classical Persian, is overall more conservative than the accent of Iran's standard register. In this regard Dari Persian is more similar to Tajiki Persian. The principal differences between standard Iranian Persian and Afghan Persian as based on the Kabul dialect are:

The merging of majhul vowels and into and respectively in Iranian Persian, whereas in Afghan Persian, they are still kept separate. For instance, the identically written words شیر 'lion' and 'milk' are pronounced the same in Iranian Persian as, but differently as for 'lion' and for 'milk' in Afghan Persian, similar to Tajiki Persian. The long vowel in زود "quick" and زور "strength" is realized as in Iranian Persian, in contrast, these words are pronounced and respectively by Persian speakers in Afghanistan.
The Classical Persian high short vowels and tend to be lowered in Iranian Persian to and, unlike in Dari where they might have both high and lowered allophones.
The treatment of the diphthongs of early Classical Persian "ay" and "aw", which are pronounced and in Iranian Persian. Dari, on the other hand, is more like ancient Persian, e.g. نخیر 'no' is realized as in Iranian but in Afghan Persian, and نوروز 'Persian New Year' is in Iranian but in Afghan Persian. Moreover, is simplified to in normal Iranian speech, thereby merging with the lowered Classical short vowel . This does not occur in Afghan Persian.
The pronunciation of the labial consonant و, which is realized as a voiced labiodental fricative in standard Iranian, is still pronounced with the classical bilabial pronunciation in Afghanistan; is found in Afghan Persian as an allophone of before voiced consonants and as variation of in some cases, along with.
The convergence of the voiced uvular stop and the voiced velar fricative in some dialects of Iranian Persian is absent in Dari, where the two are still kept separate.
and in word-final positions are distinguished in Dari, whereas is a word-final allophone of in Iranian Persian.
Dialect continuum

The dialects of Dari spoken in Northern, Central, and Eastern Afghanistan, for example in Kabul, Mazar, and Badakhshan, have distinct features compared to Iranian Persian. However, the dialect of Dari spoken in Western Afghanistan stands in between the Afghan and Iranian Persian. For instance, the Herati dialect shares vocabulary and phonology with both Afghan and Iranian Persian. Likewise, the dialect of Persian in Eastern Iran, for instance in Mashhad, is quite similar to the Herati dialect of Afghanistan.

Dialects of Dari Persian

In a paper jointly published by Takhar University and the Ministry of Education in 2018, researchers studying varieties of Persian from Iran to Tajikistan, Identified 3 dialect groups present within Afghanistan. In an article about various languages spoken in Afghanistan, Encyclopaedia Iranica identified a nearly identical categorization but considered varieties spoken in the Sistan region to constitute a distinct group.
Takhar and the MOE only discussed vocabulary differences between the dialect groups and did not extensively discuss phonological differences between these groups. However, there was a noticeable difference in the romanizations of the Western dialects and the South-Eastern dialects. Chiefly that the vowel diacritic "pesh" was romanized with an "i" for South-Eastern dialects but as an "e" for western dialects. This is presumably due to a difference in quality, however the paper itself did not explain why the vowels were transliterated differently.

Southeastern

The Southeastern group constitutes dialects spoken in and around Kabul, Parwan, Balkh, Baghlan, Samangan, Kunduz, Takhar, Badakhshan and others. A distinctive character of this group is its conservative nature compared to, for example, the Tehrani dialect. This can be seen in its Phonology, Morhphonology and Syntax, and its Lexicon. A further distinction may be made between dialects in and near Kabul and dialects in and near Afghan Turkistan. With dialects near Kabul exhibiting some influences from languages in southern Afghanistan and South Asia and dialects in Afghan Turkistan exhibiting more influence from Tajik. All Southeastern varieties exhibited some influence from Uzbek. Despite the Afghanistan Ministry of Education referring to this group as "Southeastern" some of the dialects included are in the north.
As seen in many Hazaragi dialects, certain Eastern Dialects have developed a system of retroflex consonants under pressure from Pashto. They are not widespread, however.
The Kabuli dialect has become the standard model of Dari Persian in Afghanistan, as has the Tehrani dialect in relation to the Persian in Iran. Since the 1940s, Radio Afghanistan has broadcast its Dari programs in Kabuli Dari, which ensured the homogenization between the Kabuli version of the language and other dialects of Dari Persian spoken throughout Afghanistan. Since 2003, the media, especially the List of [television channels in Afghanistan|private radio and television broadcasters], have carried out their Dari programs using the Kabuli variety.

Western

The Western group includes various dialects spoken in and around: Herat, Badghis, Farah and Ghor. Dialects in this group share many features with the dialects of Persian spoken in Eastern Iran, and one may make many comparisons between the speech of Herat and Mashhad.

Central/Hazaragi

The Central group recognized by Afghanistan Ministry of Education consists of the Hazaragi dialects spoken mostly by the Hazara people. These dialects are spoken throughout Afghanistan, like in the capital city of Kabul. The "Central" label stems from Hazara majority regions in central Afghanistan. As a group, the Hazaragi dialects are distinguished by the presence of retroflex consonants and distinctive vocabulary. It has been shown that Hazaragi dialects are accurately a group of sub-dialects of Dari and not their own varieties of Persian.

Sistani

Afghanistan's Ministry of Education does not make a distinction between varieties of the Sistan region and the varieties in the Western group. However Encyclopaedia Iranica considers the Sistani dialect to constitute their own distinctive group, with notable influences from Balochi.

Phonology

Consonants

Stops // are phonetically dental .
A glottal stop /ʔ/ only appears in words of Arabic origin.
A flap sound // may be realized as a trill sound , in some environments, mostly word-final position; otherwise, they contrast between vowels wherein a trill occurs as a result of gemination of , especially in loanwords of Arabic origin. Only occurs before and after consonants; in word-final position, it is usually a free variation between a flap or a trill when followed by a consonant or a pause, but flap is more common, only flap before vowel-initial words.
As in many other languages, is realized as bilabial before bilabial stops and as velar before velar stops.
is voiced to before voiced consonants.
/w/ is almost always voiced as, as in Middle Persian.
Vowels

Dari does not distinguish and in any position, these are distinct phonemes in English but are in un-conditional free variation in nearly all dialects of Dari. There are no environmental factors related to the appearance of or and native Dari speakers do not perceive them as different phonemes. However, speakers in Urban regions of Kabul, Panjšir and other nearby provinces in southern and eastern Afghanistan tend to realize the vowel as . Speakers of Dari in central Afghanistan tend to realize the vowel in proximity to, or identically to, , unless the following syllable contains a high-back vowel. Speakers in western Afghanistan and some rural regions in the Kabul province most commonly realize the vowel as . Additionally, in some varieties of Dari, the phoneme appears as an allophone of .

	Front	Back
High
Mid
Low

When occurring as lax, the open vowels are raised to.
Political views and disputes on the language

Successive governments of Afghanistan have promoted New Persian as an official language of government since the time of the Delhi Sultanate, even as those governments were dominated by Pashtun people. Sher Ali Khan of the Barakzai dynasty first introduced the Pashto language as an additional language of administration. The local name for the Persian variety spoken in Afghanistan was officially changed from Farsi to Dari, meaning "court language", in 1964. Zaher said there would be, as there are now, two official languages, Pashto and Farsi, though the latter would henceforth be named Dari. Within their respective linguistic boundaries, Dari Persian and Pashto are the media of education.
The term continues to divide opinion in Afghanistan today. While Dari has been the official name for decades, "Farsi" is still the preferred name to many Persian speakers of Afghanistan. Omar Samad, an Afghan analyst and ambassador, says of the dispute: